Sub-Cultures and Narratives of Race in Hungary

Introduction

Recent political developments in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe have resurrected scholarly interest in the history of race. Officially abandoned after 1945, theories of race have been slowly re-adapted to reflect developments not only in history and sociology but also biology, medicine and science, more generally. Increasingly, attention has shifted towards the wider narratives, languages and terminologies of race that never disappeared and, thus, have paved the way to the increasingly racialized world of today. These epistemologically-oriented narratives revised those outdated lines of reasoning that depicted the history of race as ‘pseudo-science’, as a form of ‘reactionary bourgeois irrationalism’ (Georg Lukács), unworthy of the same critical hermeneutics applied to other topics of historical inquiry.

In this article I suggest that sub-cultures and narratives of race in Hungary should not be treated as extraordinary episodes in the country’s history, removed from socio-political life as deviations from ‘normal’ national traditions, but as an integral part of Hungary’s twentieth century history in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest for the renewal of an idealised national community as a source of values and identity. The racial vision of a resurrected Hungarian nation pointed to the creation of an organic society in which social distinctions—divisions between the social and the political, the individual and the collective—would be eliminated. As demonstrated by the recent transformation of Hungarian public and political discourse, this racial vision continues to inform populist and radical nationalist interpretations of Hungary’s historical role in Europe and the world.

The state of our knowledge of the conceptualization of national identity in terms of race in Hungary, and in East-Central Europe, more generally, is rather limited, despite the growth of virulent radical nationalism in recent years, and increased academic interest in this subject (Feischmidt and Szombati 2012). Although it is rarely openly acknowledged, many of the nationalist narratives produced during the inter-war period, for instance, remained deeply connected to the mentalities and styles of nationalist reasoning articulated after 1990s (Kürti 2001; Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox and Grancea 2008). Crucial is the residual importance of sub-cultures of race provided a potent, if largely neglected, element in the resurgent appeal of populist and nationalist strategies devised after 1989. Their evaluation is, therefore, essential to provide refreshing insights into theories of the ‘national’, particularly those narratives centred on race coded into ethnicity and territory.

In order to accomplish this, however, one has to rethink the very categories in which the history of modern Hungarian history has been traditionally formulated. Scholars in Hungary have often embraced a selective historical memory to construct how their countries came to conceive the history of the nation (Baar 2010; Trencsényi 2012). Bringing to light sub-cultures of race, both explicit and implicit, represents a unique opportunity to come to terms with the history of our time, at a crucial political threshold when racism, populism and xenophobia are on the increase in Hungary (Mireanu 2013: 1-26).

Besides the task of mediating between the local canons and the pan-European framework, there is a pressing need to tackle the history of race in Hungary within the framework of the entangled European history: namely, to look at various national racial traditions in East-Central Europe, more generally, from a global perspective, and, thus, to challenge their purported uniqueness (Blomqvist, Iordachi and Trencsényi 2013, Mishkova and Daskalov 2014). The task now is to evaluate the degree and nature of conceptual transfers of knowledge and ideas, of interpreting race as an analytical category, as well as a new knowledge-production mechanism—and, thereby, to address the key components of Hungarian racial thought.

Racial Epistemologies of National Belonging

For the past decade, a renewed interest in race has grown very rapidly both geographically, by engaging with such diverse case studies as Mediterranean Europe and China (Dikötter 1992; Cleminson 2014), as well as thematically by unravelling the important connections between race, nation and population policies, on the one hand, and various political and religious ideologies on the other (Wieviorka 1991; Quine 1996; Griffin 2007; Yudell 2014). Within this broader definitional framework, the relationship between nation, race and population is understood as an extensive network of ideas, practices, and institutions focused on the care, regulation, disciplining, improvement and shaping of individual bodies to benefit the ideologically redefined, collective national body. Since the Enlightenment, nationalists had invested the modern state with a specific historical mission: to unite disparate narratives of historical experience and cultural traditions with the aim of redefining the social and biological lives of nations. In this context, the nation was understood as a living organism functioning according to biological laws, and embodying great genetic qualities, symbols of innate virtues transmitted from generation to generation. According to this line of reasoning, race operated through the investigation of cultural and biological processes regulating the triadic relationship between the individual, the nation and the state (Turda 2005 and 2010).

Since the Enlightenment, race evolved from a notion with which scientists explained the natural world and through which humans developed conceptions of their physical attributes (race as species and subspecies), to a concept that embodied the features of a specific religious or ethnic group (race as nation) (Hudson 1996: 247-64). Whereas, previously, the emphasis had been placed on the supposed innate differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, now differences between nations and ethnic groups within Europe became the focus of attention (Eze 1997; MacMaster 2001; Frederickson 2003; Golash-Boza 2014). The concept of race was gradually channelled in new directions, as the defining marker of national identification. If, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Herder, Romanticism and the French Revolution, nationalist thinkers were preoccupied with asserting the individuality of each national language, by the end of the century, under the spell of racial thinking and Social Darwinism, they had found other aims: in addition to establishing the nation’s historical continuity, what remained to be achieved was the integrity of its territory (constructed as a sacred homeland) and racial identity (understood in terms of a community of blood kinship and historical destiny). As a result of this conceptual transformation, theories of the nation focused as much on establishing particular ethnic and racial characteristics as on defining the nation according to linguistic and cultural criteria. It was this fluid relationship between cultural expressions of identity and the biologisation of belonging that informed the formation of sub-cultures and narratives of race in Hungary and elsewhere in East-Central Europe.

National traditions revisited

In contrast to the seminal scholarly works on nationalism of the early 1990s, a programme of engagement with the study of race in East-Central Europe more generally (Melegh 2006; Turda and Weindling 2007; Solonari 2009; Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans 2013), and in Hungary in particular (Gyurgyak 2008 and 2012; Turda 2010 and 2013), has only recently emerged, one that seeks to employ regional and trans-national methodologies. It is no longer enough to abandon Cold War historiography, to study what was previously banned or inaccessible, to reconstruct narratives of national and nation-state identities in their mutual exclusivity. The history of race in Hungary, as elsewhere in East-Central Europe, must re-position and re-invent itself within a wider European and global history field which is itself undergoing a profound process of change, as academic attention shifts to broader trans-national studies, especially at a time when the rise of racism, populism and anti-Semitism places issues of ethnic and racial identity and demography back on the agenda of pragmatic cultural politics.

If one comprehensively investigates the extent to which the emergence of racial sciences in Hungary during the 1910s and 1920s marked a watershed in the relations between the Hungarian state and its ethnic minorities (Jews, Germans, Roma and so on), one could then evaluate the impact which race had on the development of particular internal discourses on identity, its changing definitional framework caught between cultural traditions and biological visions of national belonging. For example, anthropometric, serological and anthropological debates on the ‘racial origin’ of various ethnic groups in Hungary, carried out throughout the twentieth century, were of particular importance to a racialised interpretation of national identity. During the 1930s and 1940s, mathematical formulae, statistics and analyses of blood groups formed a corpus of arguments that racial science hoped would demonstrate that certain ethnic groups were either ‘inferior’, and should thus be excluded; or that they were biologically verified ‘members’ of the ethnic majority and, consequentially, be forced to assimilate.

Anti-Semitism lurked in the background of most discussions on race during the 1930s and 1940s, often accompanied by the rhetoric of ‘racial defilement’ (fajgyalázás); but medical, social, and eugenic reforms adopted at the time were not exclusively posited against the Jews. Act VI of 1940 on the Prevention of Tuberculosis and Venereal Diseases and Act XXIII of 1940 on the National Fund for the Protection of Family and Nation provide illustrative examples of this duality; and so does the oft-mentioned Act XV of 1941 prohibiting the marriages between Gentiles and Jews. This latter Act was as much eugenic, dealing with medical examinations before marriage and welfare assistance, as it was anti-Semitic (Turda 2013: 558-91).

It is, therefore, equally important to unveil the manner in which Hungarian self-perceptions formulated by various racial scientists during the inter-war period corresponded to the creation of an ethnic narrative whose sustenance was revived after the 1990s. With the establishment of right wing organisations, such as Magyar Gárda Mozgalom (Hungarian Guard Movement) and Jobbik, Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik, the Movement for a Better Hungary), racial concepts became historicized as indicators of social, cultural and national change, and thus should be assigned a specifically historical quality. As Francisco Bethencourt has suggested recently: ‘particular configurations of racism can only be explained by research into historical conjunctures, which need to be compared and studied in the long term’ (Bethencourt 2013: 1).

As a result of the gradual dissemination of evolutionary and racial ideas during the nineteenth century, the nation acquired a reified corporeal and physical structure alongside its cultural one: it was portrayed as a living organism, functioning according to biological laws, and embodying distinctive, ideal physical qualities, symbols of innate virtues transmitted from generation to generation, which shaped the heroic destiny of the nation. This form of biological nationalism coexisted with and cemented other sources of identity and affinity, such as shared religion, language, culture or history. The result was a particular vision of supra-historical Hungarian national identity, co-existing and surviving the tragedies of history, such as the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 or the German occupation of Budapest in 1944.

Sub-cultures and narratives of race belong to a series of interrelated clusters of identity (social, cultural, political, economic, religious and linguistic). Together, they provided a new ideal of the national community to be achieved through a programme of social and biological improvement. Disclosed in this programme was a clear set of principles centred upon protecting the hereditary qualities of the national community, whilst simultaneously preventing it from miscegenation and assimilation. During the inter-war period, Hungarian politicians engaged directly with racial strategies, embracing the notion that the nation can and must be racially improved by means of territorial enlargement and appropriate social and economic legislation. This proliferation of racial discourse resulted in the establishment of a number of societies, such as the Alliance of Awakening Hungarians (Ébredő Magyarok Egyesülete), the Hungarian Scientific Society of Race Protection (Magyar Tudományos Fajvédő Egyesület) and the Mission for the Saving of the Hungarian Race (Magyar Fajmentő Misszió), as well as the intensification of state intervention designated to control and govern the population through a national system of public health and social welfare. The state defined a new nationalist mentality connecting fertility and reproduction with Hungarian racial values, and began shaping society accordingly. Through population transfers it increased efforts to strengthen the racial composition of contested regions; through measures to oppose birth control in urban and rural areas it planned demographic growth; finally, through prophylactic screening and social medicine it hoped to create a healthy nation.

Scholars of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm described this type of nationalism, emerging during the 1920s in Hungary, as “transformed nationalism,” characterised by its likening to the political right, the idea of self-determination and the tendency to define the nation in terms of ethnicity (Hobsbawm 1990). Some scholars, including Peter Alter, spoke of ‘integral nationalism’ (Alter 1994), while others, such as Anthony D. Smith, Emilio Gentile and Roger Griffin, referred to ‘ethnocentric nationalism’ (Smith 1983) and ‘modernist nationalism’ (Gentile 1996; Griffin 2007). Modernist nationalism emerged not only as cultural critiques of modernity, or as a process of political, legal and institutional control over the population contained within a delimited territorial space, but also as the expression of a distinctive race. The identity of the race was delineated by the real and imagined boundaries that separated those who belonged to the community from those who were outside national frontiers, such as ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’, or were excluded from membership of the nation such as internal ‘enemies’. Prompted by the need to generate a powerful sense of cohesion and shared identity among its adherents, in the wake of perceivably profound structural, social changes, Hungarian nationalists appealed to racial imagery in order to justify the biologization and scientization of national belonging. During the inter-war period, especially, Hungarian nationalism absorbed its ideas from previous forms of nationalist thinking, as well as racial and Social Darwinist theories of the nation.

Racial Renewal

It was during the inter-war period that programmes of national and racial revival fully developed in Hungary. The First World War became a catalyst for a number of new racial approaches to imagining both the Hungarian state and the nation. The state became the embodiment of the agencies and institutions concerned with the population’s health, while the nation was seen and valued as biologically adaptable and flexible to the point where it was open to disintegration under degenerative influences, or conversely, to improvement through eugenic technologies of social and biological selection. The reconfiguration of the traditional private sphere and of individual, gender and religious rights was one important consequence of this transformation. Essentially, the boundary between private and public spheres was blurred by the idea of an over-arching racial and biological imperative, which came to dominate both. As a result, it became possible to connect notions of collective welfare with individual responsibility towards the nation (Quine 2002; Turda 2010 and 2013), as well as to bring the nation and the race together, indeed synthesising them in many cases. The First World War also vindicated racial nationalism as a philosophy of social and biological regeneration across the political spectrum, whether its supporters were conservatives (Gyula Szekfő) or anti-Semites (Lajos Méhely).

The study of the origins of fascism in Hungary has rightly highlighted the dynamic appropriation and syncretic combination of racial, anti-Semitic and nationalist ideas widespread in East-Central European culture during the 1920s (Mann 2004; Hanebrink 2007; Haynes and Rady 2011). Indeed, Fascism and Nazism extracted their intellectual resources from diverse currents of modernist cultural rebellions that had denounced the moralistic, optimistic, materialistic and individualistic view of social modernization associated with the consolidation of liberal bourgeois culture in the second half of the nineteenth century (Sternhell 1994; Adamson 1993; Mosse 1999; Fogu 2003; Gentile 2003). It is, therefore, valuable to re-examine racial theories of the nation in order to understand their relevance to on-going debates about so-called ‘generic’ fascism and to shed further light upon the proliferating programmes of national regeneration masterminded by inter-war fascism and replicated elsewhere as a template for bio-political engineering aimed at the rebirth of the race.

Racism was not a phenomenon restricted to Western Europe; intellectuals and politicians from Hungary and other countries in East-Central Europe also became enamoured with racial ideas of national rejuvenation (Turda 2014). Those intellectuals who employed the category of race in their theories did so in terms illustrating their participation in both local national disputes and international scientific debates on race. It must, therefore, be accepted that there were (and still are) nationalists in Hungary who thought in terms of a ‘natural’ hierarchy of nations and, most importantly, assumed that nations were not only the result of cultural and political activity, but also existed as homogeneous biological entities.

In Modernism and Fascism, Roger Griffin has highlighted the futural dynamic of these racial theories of the nation, their thrust towards building a new ethnic community, whose “goal was the reintegration of the nation within a new ‘mazeway’ (totalizing vision of the future based on a new synthesis of ideological elements), combining elements of the past and present into a composite myth which would enable the national communitas, purged of decadence to make the transition to a new historical era” (Griffin 2007: 181). It was this extraordinary form of palingenetic mind-set and worldview that came to be adopted in the twentieth century by those who resorted to regenerative myths in order to create a new form of nationalism based on spiritual and racial unity. Independently of one another, these authors, nevertheless, suggested similar arguments, namely, that the stability and continuity of the nation were dependent upon the transmission of the unaltered ‘racial soul’ of the nation from one generation to the next (Turda 2005; Maria Sophia Quine 2013: 127-52), a concept first introduced by Herder, but now stripped of its Enlightenment connotations.

Once endowed with a noble historical genealogy, the Hungarian nation was assigned a natural territory and fixed physical characteristics; racial miscegenation was either denied as a biological blunder or seen as a source of racial degeneration. Forms of racial thinking, moreover, were intrinsically connected to a reading of the nation and culture centring on the notion that race was the main bearer and conveyer of ‘true’ culture. Hungarian nationalists often manoeuvred narratives of historical experience and cultural traditions towards the idea of the uniqueness and superiority of their own nations.

A new interpretation of the national body was, therefore, proposed during the inter-war period that strove to enunciate an organic connection between the race and its ontological, cultural and geographical space. As Lajos Méhely put it, alluding to one of the main tenets of Hungarian romantic nationalism, ‘a nation lives in its race !’ (Méhely 1934a: 216). However, race served not only to generate medicalized metaphors of the social and national body, but also to augment those technologies of hygiene and health without which modern societies were allegedly destined to descend into barbarity and backwardness. To look at these technologies closely is to confront what Alison Bashford describes as the ‘political and cultural imagining of bodies and nations’ (Bashford 2004: 5). This imagining is central to nationalism and racism alike, as both incorporated the new ideal of humanity into their revolutionary programme of social and national purification.

National Character

Concerns with the nature of the national character were certainly not specifically Hungarian, but characterised all European nations (Romani 2002; Mandler 2006; Trencsényi 2012). Nonetheless, attempts to define the nation’s racial character were both distinctive and powerful in Hungarian nationalist discourses of the inter-war period. Anthropologist Lajos Bartucz, for instance, confessed sternly that: ‘one of the most difficult problems of anthropology is to establish the characteristics of the Magyar race’ (Bartucz 1927: 211). Bartucz further argued that national character was not racial, and that racial typology made the distinction between the ‘pure’ and the ‘mixed’ Hungarians either wholly unusable or arbitrary. Hungarian racial type, although it fundamentally determined the character of the nation, did not reduce it ideas of racial purity. Instead, it constantly created national identity through cultural mythopoeia. The more biologically inclined nationalists drew the same conclusion, although identifying with precision the ‘core’ racial elements of the Hungarian nation remained crucially important. As noted by the racial scientist Lajos Méhely in 1927:

The racial elements that constitute the population of the country, therefore, have to be studied systematically for both their internal and external racial characteristics, so that a racial biological inventory (fajbiológiai inventárium) could be compiled, which could be used as a benchmark for all sorts of decisions by the intellectual, national and economic leaders of the country. For us, Hungarians, the accomplishment of this objective is twice as important, not only because it is about the establishment of the scientific anthropology of our dangerously declining race, as well as it being the last chance to do so, but especially, because we have to take stock of those racial strengths and environmental influences, which we can use to prepare the way for the physical and spiritual renewal of the Magyar race (Méhely 1927: 13).

Hungary’s troubled post-1918 history confirmed what some racial nationalists repeatedly proclaimed with respect to the national past: only a race superior in its qualities could have survived centuries of dislocation and foreign domination. Questions as to what constituted that race were subjected to heated debates, as Hungarian racial scientists could not agree whether it was Asiatic or European, Turanic, or Fino-Ugric, or all of these combined. Nevertheless, it was agreed that a ‘Magyar race’ did exist at some point in history. In the late 1930s Lajos Bartucz, for instance, largely concentrated on the typology of the ‘Magyar racial type’ and the ‘Magyar race’. With respect to the first, Bartucz insisted that centuries of interaction between a particular racial type and specific geographical conditions generated a racial fusion. As a result of the ‘millenary biological history’ a particular racial type emerged, one that was previously named ‘Mongoloid-Caucasian’, and which Bartucz re-coined as the ‘Alföld type (or the type of the Hungarian plain)’. The main racial characteristics of the “Alföld type” could be found in other races and in other countries as well. However, there are two essential conditions for the individual to become physically and spiritually ‘Magyar’: the first was to live, physically, in Hungary for generations; the second was to become spiritually assimilated into the Hungarian nation (Bartucz 1939a: 281-320 and 1939b: 32-55)

Moreover, Bartucz laboured to devise a compressed definition of racial character, concluding that the ‘Magyar national essence is formed from three essential sources: a special physical and spiritual racial structure of the national body; the biological; and the reproductive community, both created by history and the millenary environment of our country’ (Bartucz 1939a: 318). The legal scholar István Csekey reinforced this view when he commented that: ‘Race is therefore something constant, but the people and the nation vary frequently. The race is what is hereditary’ (Csekey 1939: 111). In addition, Csekey rejected the idea of racial purity and commended that the Hungarian race was racially heterogeneous:

‘It is precisely in her particular racial composition, resulting of the quantity and the quality of the racial elements represented in her that this Hungarian nation differs from all other nations of the world. And as such, one can indeed call it ‘a unique and solitary branch.’ In this sense a Hungarian race exists. It is a mosaic, a mixture that itself cannot be found anywhere in the world’. (Csekey 1939: 114)

It was exactly this ethnic mosaic that racism hoped to disentangle. Even those Hungarian nationalists who specifically rejected theories of racial supremacy and ethnic purity were too deeply engaged with the nationalistic milieu of the 1930s and 1940s not to be affected in great measure by the intellectual persuasiveness of growing racism after the outbreak of World War II. Race did not exist only in the realm of science; it also played an active role in practical politics. By the beginning of 1940, anti-Semitism, biopolitics and eugenics were fast transforming Hungarian life. Anthropological, demographic and eugenic theories were recast as ideological arguments in partisan disputes over the regained, but continually contested, territories.

The impact racial research had on public consciousness and official political discourse in Hungary needs further study, but here we can at least glimpse the wider meanings of race, and how they influenced certain scientific agendas. Imbedded within the Hungarian obsession with certain territories, like Transylvania, was the characteristically amorphous concept of national identity: An identity created in order to deepen the historical character of a country, region, community, and landscape. Anthropologists were supposed to do more than just catalogue skulls and record physical differentiations among groups and individuals. They were supposed to create new foundations for political decisions. The mapping of the race’s somatic characteristics was based on the wider assumption that it was legitimate to categorize ethnic groups through varying forms of measurement and that it was equally legitimate to represent these measurements graphically. Visual representations of the race, such as craniology, were thus accepted as examples of racial differentiation and environmental determinism. Most Hungarian racial scientists used craniology until the late 1930s to produce a narrative of descriptive racial science that could be utilized for nationalist purposes (Turda 2007: 361-77).

Parallel to this trend was one that drew its vitality from serology and blood group research. It was assumed that blood groups could offer more accurate means for classifying human races. According to one racial scientist, Lajos Méhely, for instance, blood group research was necessary for ‘the strict protection of racial borders’ (Méhely 1934b: 257). As remarked by the prominent right-wing journalist István Milotay in his overview of Hungarian racial science written in 1940 for the Italian racist journal La Difesa della razza (The Protection of the Race), ‘the fate of the nation was governed by biological forces; the nation’s grandeur, or its decline, was due to biological causes (Milotay 1940: 21).

This was only one symptom of a wider process of racial appropriation in which the biological structure of an ethnic group was actively reinvented for nationalist purposes. Another racial scientist, János Gáspár, for example, had similarly argued in 1944 that the Ruthenians in sub-Carpathian Ukraine (at the time part of Hungary) preserved ancient Magyar racial elements, thus distinguishing them from the Slovaks and other Slavs (Gáspár 1944). Both Méhely and Gáspár condensed a variety of racial ideas into the concept of Hungarian national identity. Theirs was no ordinary anthropological classification of ethnic communities but an anthropologically inclined political technology for re-establishing connections between territory and identity. It was within this polarized context that racism was assigned a new mission in both countries: to provide the nation with a corresponding national narrative for the territories regained by Hungary between 1938 and 1940. Hungarian anthropologists and biologists, such as Mihály Malán, Lajos Csík and Ernő Kállay, serologically examined the filtered ethnic composition of northern Transylvania after its return to Hungary in 1940, only to argue that the traces of Romanian rule after 1918 left were only ephemeral and did not affect the ‘Magyar racial essence’ (Malán 1940: 187-92; Csík and Kállay 1942). The nation’s racial character thus posed the question of national metamorphosis; that is, the process of viewing national belonging through a two-pronged process where one is internal (classification and differentiation), and the other external (delineating relations to other racial groups). The Hungarian nation’s uniqueness was accordingly embodied in this ideal racial type, a hypostasis in which national character found its quintessential form in nature, culture, and spirit.

With the growing importance of fascism and Nazism in the late 1930s, various racist interpretations of ‘nation’ became widespread in Hungary. Hungarian fascists such as the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt) claimed to represent the ‘true’ Hungarian nation; they were anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic. Hungarian fascists portrayed their coming into existence as the culmination and vindication of Hungarian history: they signified the renewal of Hungary’s primacy in the world as a new nation based on two principles: one racial (Hungarianism), the other religious (Christianity). Although many intellectuals and politicians were reluctant to enunciate radical racist statements, they did accept Hungary’s emerging national hierarchy, one in which the division between those deemed ‘racially Magyar’ and others—especially the Jews and the Roma—was enforced by law. Even if the regime’s constitutional framework, at least until 1944, did not allow for the physical annihilation of these ethnic groups, it did little to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism and racism among the general population, particularly after the adoption in 1939 of the so-called Second Jewish Law which included a biological definition of the ‘Jew’ based on race.

Defining the nation in racial terms expressed a broader attempt to build a new national state adapted to the unique conditions resulting from the territorial re-creation of Greater Hungary after 1938. While Hungary’s political alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War undoubtedly played a role in the wide acceptance of biological concepts of identity by the political and cultural elites, native racial thinking played a far greater and more influential role (Vonyó 2001; Romsics 2009). The glorification of Hungarian racial values gradually morphed into virulent anti-Semitism aimed at segregating the Jews from the Hungarian nation. In contrast to the idea of racial symbiosis advocated by anthropologists like Bartucz, racial anti-Semites like Méhely promoted an alternative image of the future, namely that of a Hungary without Jews and other ethnic groups deemed ‘inferior’. With the Arrow Cross’ seizure of power on October 15, 1944, anti-Semitism reached a new level. Hungarian racists grew more assured, basing their actions on a political agreement that attested to an accepted racial difference between ‘racially pure Magyars’ and the Jews. In this context, race was exercised not as a scientific concept, but as the main component of an anti-Semitic policy which ultimately provided legitimacy to the deportation of the Jews to Nazi extermination camps.

Learning from the Past

There is now a renewed interest in race, not only in the social and natural sciences (Gat 2013; Morning 2014: 1676-85), but also in the cultural debates on the widespread political violence, populism, xenophobia and racism which exist everywhere in our world today (Nordin 2005; Hainsworth 2008; Yudell 2014). In Hungary, the right-wing movement makes the Roma the centrepiece of a new brand of racial and racialized politics whose intellectual sources are to be found in the inter-war period (Varga 2014: 791-807). It is not only because sub-cultures of race have survived the communist period but they also offer insights into understanding the current radicalisation of politics threatening democratic civil society in Hungary.

Current racial arguments had, for more than a century, facilitated the transfer of knowledge between such diverse scientific fields as literature, history, medicine, anthropology, psychology, economics, demography, law, sociology and philosophy. Until 1945, race, like nation, was an instrument of identity construction, and one whose importance has been renewed after the collapse of communism in 1989. Central to this development, are the re-invention of Hungary’s historical past (clearly exemplified in current attempts to re-habilitate Admiral Miklós Horthy, for instance) and the search for the nation’s historical and cultural place. As a result of the unprecedented changes of the last two decades in Hungary, the ‘Magyar race’ has become extensively reified in cultural and political discourse in a spirit incompatible with liberal and civic interpretations of the Hungarian nation.